Solidkick, Char and I judged the open and for me the 4 I gave in presentation was a box full of bones. And I mean that literally! The box as presented had some greens and then a pile of "ribs" that were showing 2/3's bone all dried out and what was, I guess, meat burnt to a crisp. They were thrown into the box as if they had just been eaten and tossed into a pile.
If you get a chance, look over all of the scores and see how many DQ's there were for things like pickles, jalepeno's and foil in the turn in boxes.
All of this of course was caught by tables that had table captains and judges with experience.
Cooks need to demand more CBJ's in the tent especially at the Invitational, there they should ALL be CBJ! The open I can see being more tough to get upwards of 500 CBJ's, but when you have 81 tables and each table has three CBJ's (some trained thrusday night) and three non CBJ's you cant expect consistent (or correct) judging. Training for novices was left up to the tables CBJ's...which means bad begets bad in overall expectations... Tough for a cook to figure out who to cook for, those thinking tender means fall apart or off the bone or tender meaning a nice pull to the brisket or give to the bone.
Sorry about the rant, but teams were turning in some odd things and judges need to be "seasoned" and certified...
